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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoChris Russell | DispatchVendors played a large part in the Ohio Bigfoot Conference in Cambridge, where Lila Slatzer spent her day waiting for cookie customers. She said she is an occasional Bigfoot hunter herself.

Well, no — of course, a Bigfoot didn’t show. They don’t want to be found, you know.

But the annual Ohio Bigfoot Conference in Cambridge went on yesterday without one of the
creatures, often described as 9 feet tall, covered in hair, with thin lips and deep-set eyes that
sometimes glow red in the dark.

“Every year, I bake a couple hundred cookies, come here and sell my wares,” said Slatzer, who,
along with her husband, has been hunting a Bigfoot for about 30 years.

Cookie price: $1 each.

The conference has been around for more than 20 years. Some of the 300-or-so conference
attendees consider themselves “die-hard” Bigfoot trackers. Some have had experiences — they know
something lurks in the woods because they’ve seen it. Others are simply open to the idea that an
apelike creature lives among us, rarely detected.

“There’s the dyed-in-the-wool kind,” said Jackie Baker, who came to the conference from Akron. “
I’m not die-hard. I’m just curious.”

Slatzer said, “I think everybody, in the back of their mind, believes that there is something
out there. There has to be.”

All of them take the topic seriously. No grainy Sasquatch videos are played, and no one shows up
in a goofy Bigfoot suit.

“Bigfoot’s not a laugh anymore. It’s not a joke. There are more and more people looking,” said
Marc DeWerth, conference organizer and president of the Ohio Bigfoot Organization. “Nowadays, you
experience Bigfoot, and you’re put up on a pedestal. You could probably dot the ‘i’ at an Ohio
State football game.”

Several attendees said they’ve spotted a Sasquatch. (Feel free to use Bigfoot and Sasquatch
interchangeably, they say.)

Abe Del Ray likes coming back to the Ohio show from his home in St. Paul, Minn., because Ohio
was the site of his first Bigfoot experience, in 2001. He heard it crunching in the woods, coming
toward him on two feet.

“We started running,” said Del Ray, who heads up the Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team and hosts
an Internet radio show. “I know it was a Bigfoot.”

Speakers at the conference included a wildlife biologist from Vancouver Island, British
Columbia, who lectured about scientists’ reluctance to accept Bigfoot-related evidence.

Famed Bigfoot seeker and adventurer Peter Byrne was on hand to greet conference-goers. He told
stories of his multiyear expedition to the Himalayas in search of the yeti in the 1950s.

People had lots of questions for the speakers. Does Bigfoot ever wander into the suburbs? Do you
think the sighting up in Morrow County was real? But no one asked the more basic question: Is
Bigfoot real?